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Section 1Architectural FoundationsPreview
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Summary
The exam tests designing secure architectures within AWS, a critical domain for ensuring data protection, compliance, and operational resilience. It emphasizes the principles of least privilege, defense in depth, and automation to minimize risk and simplify management.
Key Points
**IAM Roles:** An IAM role is an AWS identity with permissions and a trust policy. A trusted principal assumes the role, and AWS STS issues temporary security credentials for the resulting role session; roles do not contain long-term credentials themselves.
Common Mistakes
**IAM Users vs. Roles:** IAM users have long-term credentials; roles are assumed by trusted principals, and STS returns temporary credentials for the role session.
Exam Tips
Prioritize solutions that avoid long-term credentials and use roles, trust policies, scoped permissions, and STS-issued temporary credentials.
Section 2Resilience & DRPreview
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Summary
The exam tests designing resilient architectures and disaster recovery (DR) strategies within AWS. Resilience ensures your application continues to function correctly even when components fail, while DR outlines procedures to restore operations after a major disruption.
Key Points
**Amazon SNS:** Used for publish/subscribe messaging, enabling decoupled communication between services. Lambda functions can be subscribers to SNS topics, allowing asynchronous processing.
Common Mistakes
**SQS vs. SNS:** SQS is a queue; SNS is a publish/subscribe system. SNS *can* trigger SQS queues.
Exam Tips
Prioritize solutions that meet the stated RPO and RTO while recognizing that asynchronous replication, DNS caching, and workload readiness can limit recovery behavior.
Section 3Performance TuningPreview
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Summary
The exam tests designing architectures that meet performance requirements, a critical aspect of delivering a positive user experience and optimizing costs. High-performance architectures often involve trade-offs between latency, throughput, and cost, requiring careful consideration of workload characteristics and AWS service capabilities.
Key Points
**EBS Volume Types:** gp3 is the current general-purpose SSD option with independently configurable IOPS and throughput within limits; gp2 performance scales with volume size and uses burst behavior. io2 and io1 support provisioned IOPS use cases, with io2 generally preferred for newer high-durability workloads where supported. st1 is throughput-optimized HDD for frequently accessed large sequential workloads, while sc1 is cold HDD for less frequently accessed throughput-oriented workloads; st1 and sc1 cannot be boot volumes.
Common Mistakes
**EBS vs. EFS:** EBS provides block storage for EC2 instances, while EFS provides network file storage accessible by multiple instances.
Exam Tips
Prioritize services that fit the workload characteristics and can scale or decouple components without assuming any service guarantees performance by itself.
Section 4Cost ManagementPreview
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Summary
The exam tests designing cost-optimized architectures within AWS. Cost management is a critical consideration for any cloud deployment, and understanding various AWS services and features that directly impact cost is essential for achieving efficiency and maximizing ROI.
Key Points
**Amazon S3 Storage Classes:** S3 storage pricing and retrieval characteristics vary by Region, duration, object size, request volume, retrieval tier, and current pricing. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is intended for rarely accessed long-term archives with extended retrieval times, while S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access and moves eligible objects among supported tiers.
Common Mistakes
**S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval vs. Glacier Deep Archive:** Glacier Flexible Retrieval supports multiple retrieval options, while Glacier Deep Archive is intended for rarely accessed long-term archives with extended retrieval times. Minimum-storage-duration and retrieval charges apply.
Exam Tips
Prioritize lower-cost options only when the requirements allow their retrieval time, interruption behavior, minimum duration, performance, and operational trade-offs.
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